Emperor Of The Fading Suns Hyperion Patch
- Emperor of the Fading Suns, a really nice strategy game sold in 1996 for Windows, is available and ready to be played again! Time to play a managerial, sci-fi / futuristic, turn.
- Emperor of the Fading Suns is an otherwise superb 1996 4x grand strategy game marred by a malfunctioning AI (in the vanilla game the AI would often refuse to build units, and in fact could never actually beat a player due to being unable to initiate the conditions that would allow it to win).
Nice old game, this 'Emperor of the Fading Suns' is a good candidate to populate my nightmares.
The game demo is easily downloadable and, provided your monitor supports 8BPP, it works quite well.
If you don't like 8BPP, DxWnd can help: set default configuration, but uncheck the 'Run in window' flag and there are good chances that the game will work fulscreen with the native desktop color depth.
The problems start when you try to set the game in window mode. It blits black screens, or, to be more precise, it doesn't blit a thing, though it is perfectly working (press Q and then Y and it will perform an orderly Quit - Yes clean exit).
Looking for errors or strange things, here is what is incredible:
The game is supposed to update the screen by menas of Lock / Unlock ddraw operations (so far, so good) that are invoked by a piece of code associated to a CallWindowProc originated by a DispatchMessage (so far, still good enough) that receives as argument the address DDRAW.69EC5B61 (!!!).
Now, this DDRAW.69EC5B61 is a ddraw function, no doubt about it, but it has no name, it's not exported by the ddraw.dll library, and if you search for references you can find a piece of EFS.exe assembly that loads that address as a CONSTANT!!! In addition, the guessed prototype of the function is this one:
We collected one metadata history record for Hyperion.twarriors.com. Hyperion Twarriors has a poor description which rather negatively influences the efficiency of search engines index and hence worsens positions of the domain.
The whole thing seems originated by the EFS.exe call to a DispatchMessage for a WM_PAINT message, so it seems reasonable that the goal of all this stuff is blitting something to screen.
For DxWnd, of course, the problem is how to manage a ddraw call that is not exported. Maybe working on DispatchMessage, perhaps ..
Last edit: gho 2017-05-29
This mod for Emperor of the Fading Suns focuses on the following:
·Improving the combat.
The standard Planetside attack modes in EFS are Indirect, Air, Direct, Close, and Psi. In the Vanilla version, a lot of units are able to attack in many of these modes. Also, many unit types were immune to some combat types to balance this. I have taken the steps to allow most units to be hit by combat modes that make sense, and then balanced that off by reduceing most units abilities to deal damage in multiple modes.
By reducing attack modes for units and reducing the power of base units like artillery, the game now rewards Hi-tech, diverse armies. You can also occasionally exploit an enemy stack that is missing a key ingredient (like anti-Air).
·Improving the economy.
An attempt has been made to correlate the “points” of resources to real units of measure. This allows a better estimate of how much Metal should be in a certain unit or spaceship (or city).
·Stretching out the technology tree.
I felt the technologies were developed much too fast in vanilla, and that the tree was too shallow. I would often obsolete units a mere 2 or 3 turns after building the first one. I have lengthened the tree as well as increase the research points needed. This make scavenging rebel forces and ruins much more necessary to keep a core of hi quality units.
·Adding units and ideas from the Fading Suns Lore.
As I began modding I had no idea the game was based on a role playing game. Once I found this out I Purchased the Fading Suns RP sourcebook so I could do more research. I found a lot of good ideas for new units as I read.
I have added Kights, Brother Battle, Vorox legions, Amaltheans, Muster, and others. Some are mercenaries that will work for money. This can allow you to develop a powerful army if you are willing to forgo spending on other things (like Labs).
I also spent a lot of time editing the galaxy map to make worlds conform better to the conditions that might be present at the time of the game. I moved cities around on earth, added the brother battle cathedral to DeMoley, put an Imperial Fleet outpost on Cadiz, and many other modifications.
·Increasing the feeling of coming out of the dark ages.
In the Vanilla Game, it was just too easy to start building up new cities and techs and immediately jump into a renaissance. It seemed impossible that after hundreds of years of decay, the known worlds would inexplicably begin a technological revolution. I, therefore, have taken steps to slow this down in the beginning of the game.
So Engineers now require Chemicals and Electroniks in substantial quantities, and Metal and Food in massive quantities. You will have no access to making your own Electroniks nor Chemicals for quite a few turns with the higher Tech costs and deeper tree. This will mean Buying from the League or else conquering worlds with the ancient production facilities you need.
It is not inevitable at all in EFS: Reality that the houses will climb out of the Dark Ages without taking steps to get their hands on some resources.
·Preventing the Urban Sprawl created by the AI.